


Shrapnel

by lonelywalker



Category: X-Men (Movies)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-19
Updated: 2011-04-19
Packaged: 2017-10-18 09:20:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,919
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/187355
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lonelywalker/pseuds/lonelywalker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After X3, Erik's not sure whose war it is anymore.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Shrapnel

_Sunday July 16th 2006  
Haifa, Israel_

 _After a quiet night in Israel, at least three waves of Katyusha rockets hit the Haifa bay area, including several hits on populated areas. MDA reports indicate that there are at least eight deaths and more than 30 injuries. (Israel Insider)_

1.

There is a saying in Israel: in Jerusalem they pray, in Tel Aviv they party, and in Haifa they work. On the afternoon of the second day of the bombardment, crudely effective rockets end the lives of eight workers at a railway depot. Erik Lehnsherr sits in a smoky café on the slopes of French Carmel, sips thick Arab coffee, and watches events unfold on Channel 10.

He should never have come. That much had been obvious even before the boy soldier had been abducted, before the Northern border was breached, and before the sky over Haifa started raining fire. He knows this city, this country, from long ago, from the days when he might have been one of those young men on the news, clad in a reflective yellow jacket, gripping a stretcher. In the state’s fledgling days there had certainly been enough work for a man like him: traumatized Holocaust survivors had been the tip of the iceberg. Maybe he should offer his services now. But he’d be kidding himself.

Then he had been nothing more than a hospital orderly, skilled only at physical labor and the emptying of bedpans. He had no medical training. He could save no one who really needed to be saved. And now? Forget the informal education he had obtained over the years; forget the certificates in structural engineering Charles forced him to achieve. They’d look at him and laugh. He’s _old_ , now. He’s old in a way he had never realized before. He’s old, and there is no way to stop the laughter once it starts.

He had seen a flicker of Pyro – of _John_ – in a San Francisco street just after dawn. Erik had only just begun to realize the stupidity of those mutant codenames, and the horror of being an inept conjurer in a world of real magic. The way John had looked at him in that fraction of a second had been horribly, tangibly real. Erik knows that expression well. He thinks of Raven, and wonders whether she would go to the aid of the humans. She still has powers, after all. She has youth, and strength, and beauty. He wonders if she has gained any compassion.

There was blood on his sheets this morning, dark and sticky. He had expected to find broken windows, and the remains of a Katyusha rocket smoking on the floor. He should have known better. He has no time for new wounds. The old ones are still bleeding out.

He gets up wearily from his chair, and goes to purchase a newspaper.

2.

The sirens come as he picks out change from his hand. Ten, eleven shekels for _The Jerusalem Post_. The metal feels awkward in his fingers, these days. It would be a good disguise, this image of an elderly, clumsy, arthritic man, if it were any disguise at all. At least the weight of the coins in his trouser pocket is a reassuring half-memory of the way they used to pull on some now-dormant section of his mind.

Yossi, the newsagents’ balding Yemeni proprietor, freezes at the sound of the sirens before barking an order at his teenage son to get to the nearest bomb shelter. He glances at Erik, at the newspaper on the counter between them, and stutters out a warning in broken English.

“ _Avanti_ ,” Erik says. I understood.

There is no more conversation. The boy sprints away, carrying his _Spider-Man_ -brand boogie board, as if about to dive into the distant waves. Yossi, more concerned with minding his store than taking shelter, crowds into the corner furthest from the entrance, nervously gulping down Red Bull. Erik briskly unfolds the newspaper, sitting down once more at one of the outside tables. The table next to his, where two bored young soldiers had been sitting with their rifles and their Coca-Cola bottles, has been pushed aside, deserted.

He’s not insane. The shelter is too far, even if he were as young and athletic as those boys. He has as much chance of being hit, blown to pieces by a rocket, while running as he does staying where he is. Erik has little idea of whether having an enemy who can’t shoot straight is an advantage. No one is shooting at him anymore but, for the first time in years, they might still kill him.

The rockets fall with distant, ominous thuds as he reaches over to take the soldiers’ discarded shesh besh board. It’s not chess, but then chess was never his game. He played it first as a curiosity, then to prove to Charles that he didn’t need an Ivy League education to figure out how to win. He still plays, occasionally, on the sidewalks and in the parks where the boards are studied by keen-eyed old men. They used to be physicists in Russia, they tell him. They used to be oncologists in the Ukraine. Here they are old men with thick accents and no paperwork. Erik hides his eyes in the shadow of his hat and says nothing. The old men see the numbers on his arm and agree to the silence. The tattoo is paperwork enough.

He sets the board down on the newspaper, covering images of carnage from Karmi’el and stories about the batteries of Patriot missiles that were meant to protect the city. Another empty promise. There are no articles about the missing boy, that grinning bespectacled Corporal who used to be the only news there was. On the international networks there is disbelief about a war fought over the fate of one man. It’s not that simple, but if it were… The boy, nineteen years old, reminds him of John – another oblivious foot soldier in a wider conflict. Preparing for the very real prospect of his own death, John had been more concerned with his hair, and the voting for _American Idol_. What would Erik have done to rescue him from enemy forces? What would he not have done?

Maybe his methods would have been cleaner. He could have stopped every rocket, every bullet, every tank, dead in its tracks. But it wouldn’t have mattered, the bloodshed, the conflict, the children crying in the blood of their parents. This is a human war. It would have been none of his concern. Now that it is his concern, his war, he is a passive, cowardly observer.

Evil men succeed when good men do nothing, Charles would tell him. This should be a lesson. It is a lesson.

Erik has never figured out how to win.

3.

No one dies. The second and third barrages of rockets into Haifa kill no one. It’s not for the want of trying. Erik walks back to his hotel, ignoring a struggling camera crew following a reporter up the mountain. The view of the harbor, usually a calm and pristine blue, comes with a price. Their clean new flak jackets, marked PRESS, have been packed away in the heat. Erik wonders if they will even bother to run should the sirens sound for a fourth time. Too much effort. Even the disaster area has become boring. Better, perhaps, that they should spend their days in Beirut.

They look for an instant as if they want to interview him, to draw some pathetic comparison between his childhood of barbed wire and what Israel is doing to the Arabs, or what the Arabs are doing to Israel. He draws the hat lower over his eyes, rolls down his shirtsleeves, and quickens his pace.

No one has recognized him thus far, even though this is a place he knew well long ago. It was too long ago. They are all dead, all those doctors who barely gave him a glance. Maybe the children, scared speechless by waking nightmares, are still walking around the city. But he is old, he has another name, and none of them want to remember those days. His face has been on the news infrequently: stock footage backing up current debates on mutant rights. Erik has watched Hank McCoy cramming his blue furry bulk behind a UN desk, and delivering witty, pointed ripostes to the Lebanese and Syrian representatives. He’s come a long way. Erik seems not to have moved at all. Even after years of political activism and violent action, they only ever saw Magneto. He’s still the invisible man he used to be.

The lobby of the hotel has a cool, dry atmosphere sustained by air conditioning. It is doing little to calm the guests. A television monitor showing Fox News repeatedly flashes red notices of breaking news before frustrating all present by diverting to footage of a wildfire thousands of miles away. Getting his key from the front desk, Erik thinks of John and smiles.

Behind him, an English businessman, his voice laced with polite panic, tries to schedule a flight out of Ben Gurion that night. He is getting nowhere. Two girls, their t-shirts bearing the logos of American universities, sit on top of crammed suitcases and swap gallows humor while waiting for a cab. One of them grins at him with an orthodontist’s smile as he passes, heading for the stairs. He’s had an irrational fear of elevators ever since he stopped being able to control their myriad parts. He’s had far more rational fears about many other things.

There are no messages on his hotel phone, or slipped under his door. No one knows he is here. The only man who has always been able to find him is dead. John lacks the expertise; Raven lacks the motivation. Charles’ students are doubtless more concerned about SATs and STDs than the fate of a man who is no longer any real threat.

He locks the door, testing it several times. It’ll hold only against accidental shoves and a case of mistaken room numbers. If anyone wants to kill him, they can do it. These days, he’s only running – and hiding – from himself. A warzone seems somehow appropriate.

The hotel and the city hold little scope for entertainment. He has one book, well-thumbed, telling magical tales of Old England. There should be hope, on many fronts, in that story of a boy king who died, and will rise again. On the television are pictures of a terrified, wailing Lebanese child, skin torn from his face. Collateral damage. Maybe he looked like that, once, sprawling in Polish mud, screaming for his mother. He even had shrapnel under his skin once, buried underneath a scar: a legacy of a long-ended war, and the days before he knew how to defend himself.

He takes it from his pocket now, unwraps the cotton handkerchief he had used to protect the fragile splinter. He had found it in the morning, jagged amongst soft blankets, finally having worked its way to the surface. It’s as if it had known and understood his dreams.

Erik holds it up to the light, just a fragment of metal, a sliver of a bullet that smashed apart and ricocheted, still smeared with his blood. A reminder of vulnerability he no longer needs.

It cracks apart between his fingers, is barely molecules by the time it hits the floor.

This is Haifa. It’s time to work.


End file.
